technique

Ahh, sidechaining! The effect us fans of electronic music fear our partners will discover just how much we actually like, and the effect that makes anti-modern electronic musicians shake from hatred. Sidechaining has many different names (ducking is an additional one), but when I speak of sidechaining, I refer to what’s popularly known as “the cool effect that makes everything pump to the beat in electronic music”. Sidechaining itself though has a pretty wide range of uses outside of just “moar pumpz plx”.

Ducking is a special application of sidechaining. In this tutorial we take a track with a kick drum – the sidechain – to "duck" (silence) another track with a pad sound. The sequencer we use is Qtractor, the ducking-plugin is Ducka, from the Arty FX plugin suite.

This video series features a basic overview of recording and editing audio, plus basic recording and editing of MIDI, using Ardour 3. We start by setting up Ardour and creating a new session. After that, we add MIDI tracks, connect our MIDI keyboard, record, and edit MIDI.

Next we add a few audio tracks and record some short segments of guitar. Finally, we do some basic editing of that recording, and some basic arrangements.

This video uses the following gear and software:

A common approach to sound synthesis is to use samples of sounds together with a sampler. In this short video series, we show you how you can use the sampler Petri-foo to create your own interesting sounds, based on samples.

You can read more about Petri-foo and find downloads for it at the official Petri-foo website.

TAL NoizeM4k3r is a popular and very capable open source synth, with excellent presets and great features. In this small video series, we will take you through the synth's entire interface, explaining what each setting does, and how you can use it to create interesting sounds.

In this video series, LMP invites you to mix an entire track together with us. The stems for the track used in this tutorial can be downloaded below. We'll start with importing the stems into Ardour and editing the song material. Next we will arrange the song before doing a basic balanced mix. Finally, we'll throw on some basic mastering effects, and do a few final touches.

Download the stems used in this tutorial series from this link.